


The Widow

by Unforgotten



Category: X-Men: Apocalypse (2016)
Genre: F/M, First Meetings, Implied Canon Divergence, Past/Referenced Murder, Pre-Movie(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-06
Updated: 2016-12-06
Packaged: 2018-09-06 22:33:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,234
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8772016
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Unforgotten/pseuds/Unforgotten
Summary: Several years after D.C., Erik meets a widow and her young daughter.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Red](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Red/gifts).



The only person to come to his recruitment meeting in that city was a young woman with a toddler on her hip.

At first, Erik was irritated. As much as he disliked being met by the authorities when he advertised himself as Magneto (and as a result of multiple such incidents, had stopped identifying himself in the literature a year ago), being vague in the pamphlets tended to result in non-mutants showing up to ask him asinine questions (or to try to sell him things).

When the woman's first question was, "She babbles to her little friends, but not to people—and she does not talk at all yet, even though she is eighteen months. I do not know if I should be worried," followed by Erik noticing that the two had been followed in by an assortment of animals including a rabbit, a fox, and three small birds, he realized this was going to be the first of his last five recruitment meetings to be even remotely close to being on-topic.

He'd never smiled at a baby before in his life, nor had any desire whatsoever to touch one—but when he looked at this one, he saw their future, and when her mother asked if he would hold her for a moment while she fixed her shoe ("If I let her down here, I will never catch her again!"), he found himself in possession of one. By the time her mother took her back, he was also in possession of four small birds in his hair and a squirrel on his shoulder, not one of them even nor the baby even slightly cowed by their proximity to Magneto.

The mother didn't seem cowed, either. In fact, the longer they talked, the more she seemed to be in his space, leaning toward him, touching his arm, giving him considering glances. Eventually, one of her glances landed on his suitcase in the corner, and she said, "Do you have anywhere to stay tonight?"

"Not yet," Erik said, though he hadn't intended to stay anywhere but a seat on a late night train when he was done here.

"It is so bitter outside," she said, and if he hadn't already suspected where this was going, it would have become clear a moment later, when she added, "You should come home with me."

She smiled at him again, and all Erik could say was, "All right."

A tiny car was parked outside; this turned out to be hers. They crowded into it, Erik in the passenger seat, the baby in the back. As they pulled onto the road, the woman said, "I am Magda, by the way."

"Erik," Erik said, before he remembered that he was supposed to be traveling under an alias.

***

Magda's house was some way from town, and snow had begun to fall by the time they arrived there. Erik stood at the living room window watching it while she put the baby, who was called Nina, to bed.

Anticipation alone had him half-hard by the time she came back from the baby's room. Inconvenient, since by then he'd become convinced she'd meant only to put him up for the night, that he'd misread the signs—

But he turned to look at her, and she came to him, and she kissed him on the lips. It was nearly chaste, the first time, the second kiss less so, and soon they were embracing tightly, one of her legs around his, as if she wanted to climb him. He wanted her to.

The couch was right there, but before they could use it to brace themselves, or fall onto it, she drew back. "Not here," she said in a whisper. "Come."

She took Erik's hand, their fingers entwined, and let him into her bedroom. By now he was fully hard, his cock aching and pulsing at its confinement. They reached her bed, and he welcomed her hands as she stroked his ass, and then unbuckled his belt. He helped her out of her shirt, her bra, everything too urgent to bother to trying to unhook the latter with anything other than his gift.

In only a few minutes, they were in their skins on the bed, making each other gasp, both inflamed. Erik's cock was pressed against her hot, bare thigh, and then she moved, or he did, and he groaned against her mouth and he came.

He panted against her neck for a moment, and then said, "—It's been quite some time for me."

"It is all right." She took him by the hand again, moved it from her breast to the thatch of hair between her thighs, where she was hot and slick and waiting for him. His finger slid into her so easily. "As long as you do not think we are done."

"Of course not," Erik said. First, he stroked her with his fingers, and then with his mouth. Her thighs were clamped around his ears for a good long while as he fucked her with his tongue, her hands pulling his hair harder the closer she got. She was breathy and loud through it all—although how loud she could truly be remained unknown to Erik, for she grabbed a pillow to scream into at her climax.

By the time she was finished, Erik was half-hard again from hearing her, tasting her. Magda noticed, and wrapped her hand around him, pumping him slowly. It should have been too much, he should have been too sensitive, but instead, the touch of her hand was the taste of cool water to a parched man.

"It has been a while for me as well," she said. "Ten months."

"Twelve years," Erik said, as soon as he'd finished the math, before he could think about whether he should give that much more away when she already knew half his name. It was difficult to make determinations of any kind with her hand on him.

"That is a very long time," she said.

At the back of his mind, he'd known it had been, but getting laid hadn't exactly been his priority since he'd gotten out of prison. He hadn't realized how hungry he was until he was lying in this bed, her naked body pressed close to his, the both of them reeking of sex, her hand coaxing him into full hardness for the second time in an hour.

She got up from the bed, dug through the drawer on her nightstand. Erik lay there and watched the way her full breasts changed shape when she bent over, and again when she straightened back up.

She came back to bed with a condom, rolled it onto him easily. She straddled him, lowered herself onto him, and this time Erik was the one who cried out loudly—somehow, he'd forgotten how good it felt, to be engulfed by someone else. He hadn't expected it.

"Shhhh," Magda said. She reached over for a pillow, shoved it at him. "Do not wake the baby. Then we would have to stop."

Erik nodded. She began to move, and he set the pillow aside, bit down on his lip, breathed harshly through his nose, closed his eyes so he couldn't be influenced by the sight of her breasts bouncing up and down with her. He meant to hold on until she was finished with him, but in the end he still lasted only a few minutes, hardly longer than he'd managed the first time.

Perhaps it was for the best; when she pulled off him, curled up next to him, and he reached between her legs, she batted him away.

"I am done," she said, in a husky, satisfied voice that made his cock twitch, even though there was no chance he'd get even halfway there for a third try. Magda noticed this, too, and giggled. "You are making up for lost time!"

As it turned out, Erik was making up for lost sleep; if she said anything else, he was already too far under to catch it.

***

An unknown time later, still half-asleep, he blinked his eyes open. The bedside lamp was still on, but Magda was no longer in the bed. In the hollow where she had been, there was a newspaper, with a very familiar photograph above the fold.

The instant he recognized where it was from, Erik sat up straight in the bed, now completely awake. He picked up the paper and began to read the story accompanying the photograph. He was halfway through before there came the sound of a toilet flushing, followed by water running in a sink. By the time Magda came back in, he'd finished.

"Oh," she said. "You are awake."

"Yes."

She got back into bed, pulled the covers over her legs and stomach, peeked over his shoulder. "That is you, yes? Erik Lehnsherr?"

He'd read dozens of articles like this one over the past few years, passed by his own face on newsstands in twenty different countries. Erik Lehnsherr, also known as Magneto, the terrorist who'd attempted to assassinate Nixon, who was currently suspected to be somewhere in Mexico, and whose only even half-hearted defender was one Charles Xavier (and even he had little to say in Erik's defense except that having been secretly imprisoned without trial for Kennedy's assassination had been, well, rather  _unfair_ ).

If this particular paper hadn't been two months old, and if he hadn't, in fact, been in Mexico two months ago, he could at least have taken heart in the notion that they were completely wrong about his current location.

"Half of it's lies." Meaning nearly everything about his motivation—the papers knew that he was Jewish, originally from Germany, that he'd survived Auschwitz (though not how, a well-fed lab rat despised by all the rest). Bare facts were all they'd had, and what they'd extrapolated from them was enough to know that Charles, for all his shoving his nose in where Erik didn't want it, hadn't broken the greatest of his confidences. He probably thought Erik valued his privacy over accurate publicity; Erik was going to have to send him another strongly-worded telegram at some point. "The rest is nearly as bad."

He considered that he might need to leave here now, tonight. He hadn't had any intention of telling Magda who he was—had been keeping his identity close against the day he found a true ally he could trust with it, with whom he could begin to rebuild the Brotherhood of Mutants anew. Magda, he already knew, was not that ally. It had nothing to do with her being a mother, and everything to do with the fact that she was certainly human. After she'd herded all her daughter's animal friends out of the house, there had been nothing else out of the ordinary. There would have been—even mutants who hid their abilities in public relaxed when they were at home, on their own territory again. Knowing he was a mutant, she wouldn't have bothered to hide her mutation once they were alone, unless there was nothing for her to hide in the first place.

"Do you intend to turn me in?" he asked, meaning to sound more dangerous than he did—but she was still quite naked, pressed close to him, one of her soft breasts brushing against his shoulder.

"No," she said. "I do not need a reputation."

Whatever the implication there was, Erik found it unexpectedly grating. "For what? Cheating on your husband with a mutant?"

It wasn't a guess; he'd felt them in the bureau the moment he'd stepped into the house. Two rings, one wide, the other narrow. One for him and one for her. It hadn't mattered then. It didn't matter now. Whatever the consequences were, it wasn't as if he would be the one to face them.

"My husband died eight months ago," she said.

"...Oh."

"Do not tell me you are sorry."

"I didn't intend to." Erik found it trying enough to apologize for things he'd had a hand in and actually regretted; he hadn't been anywhere near this.

"I am not sorry."

There was a moment when Erik thought he could have asked, and she would have told him—perhaps was even hoping he would ask, so that she could. But he was only here for the night. If her husband had cheated on her, Erik didn't need to know that. If he'd beaten her, he didn't need to know that, either. He wasn't here for any of the ties that came from letting another person admit to a weakness.

The moment passed, Erik set the newspaper aside, Magda turned off the lamp, and, once she had fallen asleep, Erik was able to sleep again as well.

***

Erik intended to leave first thing the next morning, before Magda or her child woke up—but when he glanced out the window to see how much snow they'd gotten, he saw that at least a foot had dropped overnight. There was no chance of him walking out of here.

He went to see what she had to eat in the kitchen. The sausages were crackling in the skillet by the time Magda got up and went into the baby's room. She began speaking to her, a low, soothing murmur Erik could nearly make out if he strained. Soon, Magda brought Nina out and sat her down in her highchair. By then, Erik had set breakfast out on the table. He hadn't thought about giving the baby a plate, and was thus somewhat startled when Magda cut one of her sausages into tiny pieces, then took one and blew on it and began coaxing Nina to eat with claims that the fork was a sparrow.

Ten minutes after the two had arrived in the kitchen—by which time Erik had finished eating, Magda hadn't started yet, and the baby had eaten six bites—he noticed several birds hopping around the windowsill.

"Should I let them in?" he asked.

Magda glanced at the window. "Not while we are eating. Probably not before we leave. I do not have the time to clear up after them before work."

"All right."

"I will drive you back into town today, if you would like."

"I would appreciate that."

Magda kept on feeding the baby—who had seemingly grown suspicious of the fork as a sparrow, so that it was now meant to be a rabbit, instead. After several more bites, the baby was finished, and Magda set the fork down.

"Do you think it is bad for her, not to have her friends inside?" She hadn't sounded at all anxious about his real identity, but the fretful note that had been in her voice throughout their entire first meeting the night before had now returned. "They make such a terrible mess, so I do not let them in for more than an hour or two a day. Usually it does not matter—but we can spend more time outside when it is warmer. Now it is too cold to do that so much."

"I don't know," Erik answered. He'd never spent much time thinking about the everyday problems mutant children might face. That they'd be rounded up, experimented upon, slaughtered in mass graves—those were the problems he'd focused on, not mundane questions like this one.

"My mother watches he when I am at work. She does not allow Nina's friends in her house at all, and she does not let Nina play outside. She believes they will leave if we ignore them for long enough."

"Then she's a fool."

"—I did not say I agree. Nina is what she is. Her friends make her happy, and for me that is enough. But I worry that she is not able to play with them enough when she is with me, and not at all when she is not."

"Mm."

"Her other grandparents watch her sometimes, but they are not much better. They brought home a cat after Nina's powers came, and they think that is enough. Even though she does not like cats—to them, it is all the same. They think they are bending enough and do not need to do more."

"I don't know what to tell you," Erik said. He wished he could introduce her to Charles, who would surely have some idea what to do. At the same time, he was excruciatingly glad Charles was on the other side of the Atlantic, unable to horn in with his eyes and his lips and his horrible but effective pickup lines (which, having worked on Erik, were obviously guaranteed to work on women as well). "This isn't exactly my field."

"That is fine. It is helpful to talk about it. Perhaps I will have a breakthrough." Now, she seemed to notice there was still food in front of her, and took a bite. "This is very good," she said, "but I thought Jews did not eat pork."

Normally, Erik didn't endure inquiries about how terrible a Jew he was, especially from people who were not themselves Jewish. But there seemed to be no malice here, just the same curiosity from the night before, and so he said, "I haven't kept kosher since I was a boy." Then, though he didn't expect to say more, and had never discussed his family with anyone (not even Charles, who'd simply taken what little he'd been willing to share), "Even then, my parents were more secular than the rest of our family. We often cheated."

"I see."

"Though never when my mother's sister was visiting. She married into an orthodox family when I was very young. There was some friction between her husband and my parents. My mother did the best to keep the peace, so they would come eat with us on the holidays." Now that he'd started, Erik found that he no longer remembered all the details of what had happened there. All he remembered beyond the basic shape of it was the ending, the one that went with every story from his boyhood. "Not that it mattered. We went into hiding, and never heard from them again."

"I am sorry."

Perhaps if she hadn't read that article, and worse, seen his tattoo, the sentiment might have been bearable. But as it was—

"When are we leaving?" he asked.

"As soon as I am ready," but when Magdalooked at the clock, she squeaked, and spent the next fifteen minutes rushing around the house to get herself and Nina dressed and make herself a lunch. (Erik had apparently made this easy for her, as she simply packed herself the rest of her breakfast, along with a fork and knife.)

Once she and Nina were bundled up, Erik followed her out, only to bump into her when she stopped in the doorway. She looked at Erik, then back out at her car, marooned out in the snow.

"I think maybe I am not going to work today," she said. "By the time I arrived, it would be time to come home. You do not mind staying another night?"

***

Now that Nina was not only awake but set loose on the house, Erik soon learned what Magda had meant when she'd said Nina only talked to her friends. She'd been all but silent when it was just the three of them—but the moment Magda opened a window to allow the birds and several squirrels inside, she became as talkative as any three children. It was all babble, and it was difficult to tell how much of the birds' noise was them talking back rather than simply making their own noise, but they certainly seemed to be responding to her in other ways. They followed her wherever she went in the house, and went wherever she pointed. When she climbed onto the couch to see Erik, all of her friends, again, ended up in his hair or on his shoulder. Erik went completely still the moment Nina climbed onto his lap, and didn't relax again until she climbed back down (which, thankfully, was only a minute or two later—she seemed to much prefer running from place to place to sitting anywhere for long).

After the third time she climbed onto him (which led to Magda saying, "Nina, leave that poor man alone," although Erik hadn't complained), Erik excused himself outside. He hadn't wanted a smoke this badly since his first few years underneath the Pentagon, but unfortunately, he'd decided not to take the habit back up when he got back out, and so there was nothing he could do about it now.

Her house now seemed even more remote than it had before. It had little to do with the snow, which had been his first thought; although the snow seemed likely to be hiding the road, she didn't seem to have neighbors, at least not close enough for Erik to see any plumes of smoke rising from the surrounding trees.

Wherever the road might have been, the driveway was just as impassible. Surely someone would be along to plow at some point—but until then, it seemed unsafe.

Erik put his head back inside. "Where's your show shovel?"

"It is in the shed. To the side of the house." Magda was bent over the couch, cleaning up yet more bird shit, and waved vaguely to the right with the dirty rag in her hand.

Erik trudged around to the shed. It had a deadlock on it, but that was nothing. Inside, he found the shovel easily enough; it was plastic, except for a sharp strip of metal along the bottom. No wonder he hadn't been able to feel it out.

He stared at it for a moment, then waded back to the front porch. There he began the work of clearing the driveway, fifteen times more back-breaking than he'd planned for. He ducked back in the house a few times, whenever he felt a vehicle at the edge of his range, which might or might not be coming down the road, which itself might or might not be within sight of him.

By the time he'd freed her car and dug all the way to where the gravel ended and the dirt road began, it was early afternoon, and he was covered in sweat inside his coat. By the time he'd been inside long enough for it to dry on his skin, he began to shiver. It took a long, hot shower and a dry set of clothes before he felt remotely warm again.

"Where's the baby?" he asked, when he realized he hadn't seen her since before her shower, and that the kitchen window was now closed, Nina's friends banished to wherever they went when they weren't here.

"I put her down for a nap." Magda gave him a speculative look. "Perhaps we should lie down also."

A moment ago, Erik would have sworn he was too exhausted to do anything else today, much less anything that would have him swearing again; now he found a second wind. "Good idea."

***

Afterward, her leg draped over his thighs, arm across his abdomen, head on his shoulder, she said, "Thank you for shoveling."

"It's fine."

"If you are thinking this was your thanks, it is not. My thanks was your thanks."

"What was this, then?"

"This was because you are very handsome when you are cleaned up."

Erik's face felt hot, suddenly. "Is that so."

"Yes. I thought the same thing last night, too—but I would not have brought you home if you had not smiled at my daughter." So they were back around to this. He should nip it in the bud this time, Erik knew. Magda seemed the type to get attached, and he would be leaving tomorrow. But he found he didn't mind listening to her talk, certainly not enough to stop her, or to remind her that she'd already shared her concerns about Nin at great length. "No one smiles at my daughter, once they know what she can do. And there are no other mutants here."

"That you know of."

"That I know of, yes. There are none. There are only people who stare at her, or cross the street when we are coming, or worse."

It occurred to Erik, suddenly, that she might have come to his meeting for a more serious reason altogether. He found himself waking up in a way he hadn't in quite a few meetings in six or seven countries. "Is she in danger?"

"I do not think so. Not anymore." Nevertheless, there was fear in this room now, much different from the lesser anxieties she'd shared before. "Maybe I will tell you about the worst danger she was ever in."

"Maybe you should."

She was quiet for a minute, and then, apropos of nothing: "Her father, my husband—he loved her so much. After she was born, he held her very often, spoke to her so sweetly. He got up with her in the night as often as I did, changed just as many of her diapers."

Darkly, Erik wondered why the subject had changed, why she thought he wanted to hear about her sainted husband when he'd been inside her five minutes ago.

"When she was six months old, her mutation came." Magda didn't seem to notice his ire; she wasn't even looking at him. "That was when he changed. It was not all at once, and there was so much to do with the baby, so I did not notice at first. Then, one day, I realized he had not held her, had not spoken to her in more than a week. That he had never acknowledged any of her friends at all. I confronted him, of course. I demanded to know what was wrong with him."

"And what did he say?"

"He would not say anything. He slept on the couch for weeks. It made little difference; he had not touched me in more than a month before that anyway. But then, he came home very drunk one night, and he told me a story about his family's dogs. His father had bred dogs for hunting with, when my husband was young. So it was a story about that. Breeding dogs was not easy, he said. Usually, a bitch's litters, they would be fine. But sometimes, one puppy or two, or even a whole litter—they would be born wrong." Magda had shifted, so that she was now looked Erik in the eye. "He told me they did not try to raise the puppies, when they happened. Instead, they would start over. He said that to me, and then he he walked to my daughter's room. He did not say anything else. He looked at her for a few minutes. He looked at my baby, asleep in her crib. And then he lay back down on the couch and went to sleep, and claimed not to remember anything he had said in the morning."

"What did you do?" Erik asked, but he already knew. Looking into Magda's face was like looking into a mirror. What little regret there might have been when she'd begun had now burned away, leaving only justice, burning cold.

One day, he would look back and wonder when his future with Magda and Nina had become inevitable, and he would know: this was when it began to turn.

"The next night, we came home from dinner at a friend's house, and found that someone had broken in. We thought he must be gone, so we were not careful. We were wrong; he was still there, hiding in our bedroom. My husband confronted him, and was shot. He was dead before the police came."

"They believed that?"

"No one ever questioned it."

When she didn't seem about to continue, Erik said, "You shouldn't tell anyone else that story."

"And you should not tell anyone you are Erik Lehnsherr."

So. A secret for a secret.

She was looking at him still, as if waiting for something.

"You did the right thing," Erik said, giving it to her, thinking that her husband was very lucky indeed he hadn't lived long enough for Erik to meet him.

Magda scoffed. "I do not need you to tell me that. I need only to look at Nina to know it."

Erik wasn't surprised when she went to do just that, several minutes later.

***

The next morning, Magda again readied herself for work. This time, there wasn't going to be any snow day, for although it was twenty degrees colder than it had been the previous day, no more snow had fallen, and a plow had finally come down the road to her house.

"Do you mind if I stay here one more night?" Erik asked. "I'm feeling under the weather."

He gave a dry cough. Magda felt his forehead. "You don't feel hot."

But although she looked skeptical about his illness, she looked pleased, too, and didn't so much as try to convince him to let her drop him off at the train station after all.

Soon, she and Nina were off, the little car shuddering at the cold. When Erik could no longer feel them within his sphere, he did the same thing he'd done so often when he'd been younger, when he was hunting: he searched the house, top to bottom. He went through the dresser, the closet, the papers in her corner desk. He rapped on every wall that might have been hollow, tried to dig out every floorboard that might have been loose. If there was any evidence, anything to incriminate her in her husband's death, he intended to find it.

He found nothing in the house, nor in the shed. The only firearm in the house was the rifle on the living room wall, and one glance over it said that it hadn't been fired in quite a few years. There was no evidence, anywhere, that she'd confessed in writing; she had no diary, and there didn't seem to be any coding in the condolence letters she'd received after her husband's death.

When he'd finished with the house, Erik cast outward, just in case—

There it was. He hadn't wanted to find that. He'd wanted her to have hidden it better, disposed of it somewhere that could never be connected to her.

He put on his boots, his coat, followed the beacon into the woods. Not far from the house, but far enough into the trees to seem as if it were, he came to a stop in front of a patch of snow, no different from the rest. He raised his hand over the ground. Raising it took a greater effort than it might have in the spring, if the ground had been soft, but before long, it was there, floating in the air before him. Even covered in mud and snow, it couldn't be mistaken for anything other than a revolver.

For a moment it hung there under his consideration. Then, he closed his fist, and the gun melted, twisted around itself, then cooled until it was nothing more than a solid, ugly lump of metal. No one who stumbled upon it would ever guess what it had been before.

Erik left it where he'd found it, and went back to the house.

He had no intention of telling Magda what he'd done before he left tomorrow. Perhaps she'd have been relieved to hear it, but it was just as likely she'd be furious at the interference, and even more so at his snooping.

He didn't imagine, for a single moment, how great a relief it would be for both of them for him to have metal at hand in these woods a few short years from now, to know exactly from where to summon it on some future day.

***

An hour or so after Magda and Nina returned that evening, the phone rang in the living room. Magda rushed to answer it, making shushing motions in Erik's direction.

She spoke for a while, a low murmur; Erik stopped listening once he'd determined she was talking to one of her friends. By the time they went to bed, he'd completely forgotten about it. Magda, though, hadn't.

"You will never guess what my friend Klaudia told me earlier on the phone," she said, poking his ribs.

"What?"

"Her husband, he is in the militia. They planned to arrest the German spy at the train station the other night, he was not there. Then they planned to arrest him last night, and he still was not there. They are planning to watch for him again tonight, but they are beginning to suspect he will not show up again."

"What does this have to do with anything?"

Magda squinted at him, annoyed now, where before she had been acting as if this were a joke they were in on together. "You are the spy everyone has been talking about."

"What?"

"You have been asking questions all around town, in very terrible Polish. What other explanation could there be?"

"...The real one," Erik said.

"They do not know the real one."

"I passed out pamphlets!"

"They are very terrible pamphlets. Your handwriting is bad, your spelling is worse. That is why I was so late to your meeting the other day. I had to go to three addresses before I found the correct one. That is probably why they did not try to arrest you there."

Erik stared at her. There were so many things he could have said to this, but somehow what came out was, "I couldn't take them to a printer. What do you want me to do?"

"You probably should not take a train," she said. "I do not mind if you stay here for another week or two, while the trail goes cold."

There was danger here. Erik saw it clearly, or thought he did. He had work to do, and everything here, no matter how pleasant, was a distraction from that work.

And yet. Years of recruiting, and he'd recruited no one. Years of hiding, and the time to stand and fight had yet to come. What harm could it do to stay a while longer?

"A week or two would be fine," Erik said.

 

**five months later**

"You should get a job," Magda said.

Erik was at the stove, sleeves rolled up, making dinner. He looked back at her, sitting at the kitchen table, keeping him company as she so often did. "Aren't I still a spy?"

"You fell in love with me and you defected. Everyone will turn a blind eye."

"Or they'll give me the stink-eye, like Jakob."

"He and Klaudia were very nice to you when they came for dinner!"

"Nice? Is that what that was?"

Magda rolled her eyes. "It is not their fault you cannot pronounce your own name, Mister Henryk Gurzsky."

At this point, Nina rushed in, and began to tug on Erik's pant-leg.

"I've never had a job," Erik said. "Only covers."

"They are hiring at the steel plant. You would be good at it."

"Too good, perhaps."

"It pays well. You would not be so bored."

Since he'd been here, Erik had painted the house, planted a garden which no one other than Nina's friends had yet partaken of, and completed any number of other small home improvement projects. There was very little left to do unless he wanted to add a room to the house, which was out of the question since it would leave Nina and her friends with that much less yard. He found all of this more fulfilling than anything else he'd done, but he couldn't deny it: he _was_ getting bored.

"I'll think about it."

Now, Nina, who had been not-so-patiently trying to get his attention, burst out with, "Papa papa papa!"

Erik glanced at her, then at Magda, trying not to appear as if he'd been whispering such a thing to her a dozen times a day ever since she'd begun speaking. "What is it?"

"Out!" she said, pointing toward the living room. Though she'd been talking for a while now, she usually stuck with one or two words at a time, just enough to get her point across.

"Is there something out there, or do you just want to go outside?" Erik asked.

She stamped her feet. "Ouuuuut!"

In the end, the answer turned out to be, as usual, both: The doe with the notched ear and her twin fawns were in the yard, and Nina wanted to go visit with them. As had become common in these warmer months, Erik and Magda brought dinner outside and ate it there, watching Nina and her friends.

"Papa, huh," Erik said, when they'd gone too long without either of them mentioning it. He found himself almost holding his breath, waiting for the answer. He hadn't known he was hungry until he met Magda, hadn't known he was starving until he looked up one day and realized that there was nothing on earth that could convince him to leave her or Nina now. He knew, too, that Magda had been terribly lonely before him, as well—but still, the question stood, waiting for the answer.

Magda smiled at him. "It would seem to be so."


End file.
